Still
by The Golden City
Summary: "You're trying to make me fall apart Hans. Doesn't this do nothing but help you?" he asked slowly, and there was something hidden in his words that they could both see. Reaching out for something he no longer knew like he should have, something as intangible as the smell of lavender after a dream. Skipper/Hans


I'm… I'm not actually sure what this is. Well it's skans, but beyond that I have noooo idea. I blame the song tbh. And on that note, I would GET DOWN ON MY KNEES AND BEG you to listen to _Still_ by _Daughter_ before/as you read this because that's what I did and well… I guess inspiration? I don't know. enjoy it.

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Hans never let himself fall into any habits. It had always been that way, he wasn't sure why. Even when he had started to smoke the feeling had made it difficult on him. The minute he realized the need to have a cigarette was starting to dig into his mind there was an awful crawling under his skin that he couldn't shake. It stopped when he stopped craving them after he quit. It was then he started again. He'd done that so many times over the years, stopping just as he felt the control was slipping away, it would seem he was no longer addicted and somehow lacked the ability to even be addicted. Like somehow by flipping so often his body had given up on cravings. And that was just how he liked it to be.

Skipper made it easy to not fall into habits. There was no way of knowing just how he was going to be each time. Hans had tried to see the pattern, he really had, but there just wasn't one there. Sometimes he would get up, dress in silence and leave immediately like a shadow that was never there. Others he would lie still under the sheets until he fell asleep, curled up and vulnerable against his pillows. Even rarer he would speak to him, murmuring the questions that had chipped away at him on the inside. Hans would answer them when he felt like indulging him. When they were both worn completely down to the bone and breaking into fractures along the important lines of their bodies he would offer him the truth, unashamed but regretful as he grazed his fingers over his cheekbones and pulled his fingers in swirls along his throat.

His eyelids opened and lifted to look at the ceiling above him, white chipping paint and broken light fixtures staring back. The sigh caught in his throat drifted to the roof as he felt the mattress shift and in response he heaved himself up using screaming shoulders and dragged himself over to the window sill. The window was wide open, letting the cool night air in, pushing at the threadbare and ever damp curtains and he ducked his head out and lit up a cigarette from the packet on the sill.

The city was as loud as it always was, the screaming of cars in the distance, a dog howling blocks away and muted voices he could barely make out carried by the wind. He released the smoke in his lungs in long messy tails into the darkened night air and ran a hand through his sweaty hair. Though his apartment faced a brick wall that towered over it, separated by a tiny alley, on clear nights if you leaned out and pressed hard enough against the right wall, between the brick wall and the other buildings towering up into the sky you could see a view of the skyline lights echoing out in watercolour tails over the waves. A sliver of something people payed millions for. He shut his eyes slowly, savouring the ache in his muscles and red hot burn imprinted into his shoulder and the smoke coiling low in his lungs.

When he rolled over, elbows on the sill and body lazily thrown through the sheets he noticed it. He was sitting on the edge of the mattress, spine bowed and hands holding his shirt loosely in his fists, staring at it blankly with saddened heavy eyes. He inhaled deeply on the cigarette again, watching him with quiet eyes.

The harsh light of neon signs and streetlamps and headlights was always filtered down between the buildings and the bricks. Now watching the slow haze of what was left brush in soft, generous swathes over his tanned skin his eyes caught on the darkened shadows and lines that weren't there the last time he saw him. It was something in the set of his shoulders or the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed that told the story. The extremely dark eyes that would forever seem to be reflecting the sky didn't waver as he swallowed, hands now trembling from within their fabric prisons. The jagged lines and chipping pieces were starting to show, spiderwebs blistered into his warm skin and mind.

"Don't do it." He whispered, because the moment seemed to warrant a whisper, voice smoke tinted but smooth against the sound of the city.

Maybe it was a testament to the ties around them that he didn't ask what he was talking about. His whole body shuddered, spine bending even further and Hans knew his knuckles would have been burning white under his skin, seams holding just so under the pressure. "What does it matter to you?" He asked in a whisper, voice husky and thick with something that swam in menacing circles just beneath his skin.

Hans took a moment to think, drawing back on his smoke again, as he did. Finally he exhaled with a long slow breath, watching the smoke rise instead of Skipper. "Because I don't want you to fall apart on me."

He actually laughed at that one, a dark cold sound that forced itself from the hollow spaces in his chest. Hans didn't comment on it and he shook his head, casting shadows that danced along the wall behind him. Slowly he turned to face him, look at him with those dark eyes, like a flooded lake on a morning in the middle of winter. "You're trying to make me fall apart Hans. Doesn't this do nothing but help you?" he asked slowly, and there was something hidden in his words that they could both see. Reaching out for something he no longer knew like he should have, something as intangible as the smell of lavender after a dream. There was no desperation in his words, but there was a finality that would have been confused for it by anyone other than him.

He rested his cigarette on the crystal ashtray on the sill, the smoke still rising in hazy tails and dissipating into the air, leaving no more than the faint scent behind. His skin was warm and slightly damp against him as he pressed a slow kiss to the back of his neck, feeling his spine against the pillowing of his lips. slowly he coiled a hand down his bare forearm, fingers spidering out against his wrist and gently pulling it away from the shirt still knotted around it. "I want to make you fall apart." He murmured, not missing the way he shuddered at the words the way you would at an unpleasant chill in the air. "I want to." His lips shifted to his wrist, brushing just so against the skin, fingertips unintentionally grazing his face as he lifted his eyes to meet his. Blue only just in the way the ocean is blue when the clouds are heavy dark grey blankets over it. "So that means only I get to do that too you."

His lips were warm and tasted ever so faintly of salt and copper, and his hands were light against his sides, like he was afraid to push too hard. He rested his hands on his cheeks and jaw, pulling him into and holding him in the kiss, an action tender in the way it was never supposed to be but somehow had to be. The hands at his sides started to grow heavier until there were nails in his sides and he could feel the slide of salt between their lips, but he ignored it for knotting his hands into the hair at the back of his head and pulling him back from wherever his mind was going to the smoke laced kiss with him.

Minutes later when he relented both of them were back against the sheets, the white creased and pulled between them and smooth against their skin. His eyes were ever so slightly reddened, but the tears had stopped almost as suddenly as they had started.

"Did you ever love me?"

the fractures were in full view, a shattered windshield splayed against his chest and Hans knew that it was mirrored on his own, and just a few hard knocks would pull it away and flay him down to the bone in the lazy light. their hands were linked on the bed, fingers locked together like somehow it would fix everything.

His voice was wrought with tremors when he spoke again. "I don't know how to do that."

Once upon a time it wouldn't have been like this. There would have been puffed out breaths into pillows and hands that wouldn't stay still and eyes that still had something under the surface that weren't just props holding up an illusion. There would have been whispers because of conspiratory secrets and not out of fear of breaking what was holding the moment together. Once, in a place that existed behind closed eyes between the beats of his heart he would have pressed fluttering kisses with lips that would never stop smiling to his face until he fell asleep and he would wake up and they would both still be there in the morning. But he would always hear the hammering behind his rib-cage and his eyes would open to the real world again.

"I know how to want things." He murmured. "I know how to want you. I want you. And I can't love you because as much as I want you to love me I want you to hate me just the same." His fingers tightened involuntarily around Skippers, like he could somehow tether him here somehow, bind him to where they were and keep him here.

Their legs were dangling over the edge of the bed, toes inches from skimming the splintering floorboards. His ankle was caught on his foot, the places their skin brushed warm compared to the rest.

"Why did you have to kill him?" he asked.

Hans thumb drifted of its own accord. "Because people forget love. Hate and shame is something else."

Skipper laughed again, the same hollow sound as before as his eyes closed. He squeezed back where their hands were connected and leant in and kissed him slowly. "What about now?"

When he spoke his breath fanned over his lips, eyes purposefully down cast and looking away. Hans knew what he meant and he shuddered, eyes closing. He could still taste the lingering smoke in the cool air on his parted lips, the air circling in from the window leaving cold fingernail paths down his spine. Now? Now.

There was something to be said for the fragility of the whole thing. The pair of them balancing precariously on their own individual precipices and trying to keep the other from falling off the edge without dropping from their own. All the pieces on the board didn't know that behind the arsenic laced barbs and ugly bruising they could simultaneously be here, laying together in the dark like lovers as smoke drifted and broke apart somewhere far away from where they were. And they weren't supposed to know, because this wasn't supposed to happen. His warm calloused hand shouldn't be laced with his, still dripping in phantom blood that he still couldn't regret.

"I don't regret anything Skipper. I can't do that even for you." He disentangled his hand and sat up, blindly grabbing for the glowing butt of his cigarette and trying to ignore the trembling in his hand as he inhaled. He wondered if the night was clear enough to see the reflections of the lights on the water. He wondered if he could look at the water and not think of eyes that colour. "But I do wish that somehow it had been different."

He smiled some sort of bitter rendition of what a smile should be at his thighs and then ground his cigarette into the ashtray, stubbing out the glowing at the end and grinding the remaining scorched tobacco against the crystal until it was crushed. The mattress shifted again and when he turned back Skippers hands ran down his arms the way rain runs down windows until their fingers interlocked again and with the barest amount of pressure Skipper pressed his hands back onto the sill. His eyes were still heavy, but the way his chest, marked with red parallel lines, moved told him he wouldn't have to worry tonight about him doing something careless.

"Don't pretend." He murmured, and then kissed him the way you would kiss a lover. And he kissed back the same, letting himself be crowded against the threadbare curtains and deep windowsill with its peeling peach, sage and cream striped wallpaper. He gripped his hands tightly, fingers curling tightly around his, their matching palms warmer compared their fingers bared to the chill of the air and the wind still uplifting the sounds of the city that were only more and more being drowned out. He tried to express what he couldn't articulate with words in the slide of his lips and the flutter of his eyelids.

And caught up in the warmth trapped between them and the spinning mix of whatever was cycling in his head he was well aware by the morning one of them would be gone before the other was awake and the next time they saw each other could go one of two ways. But he also knew that no matter which way it went it wouldn't lead them back to this moment. Just as no choice could ever lead them back to before he pulled that trigger. And it was a good thing they didn't. Because Hans never let himself fall into any habits.

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how do I ending? ugh. anyway I hope you semi-enjoyed it at least. I had a good time writing it so if you had a good time reading it that's all I can ask for. Peace.


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